The Professor Speaks of Geo-Design

by Sandee Gertz

What is the weight and imprint of a town?
Our place in etched map indents
or cut gemstone rock from underneath our feet?
The professor holds up slides of geo-designs:
one by one, exposing the underworld
of the State of Pennsylvania.

And I can’t help but wonder what lay beneath
my calico print bed on David Street, Johnstown.
Or by the copper creek: its orange tinge grown
from chemical agents, chasing us the day we ran
from the flood walls — the ones the Army Corp of Engineers
raised higher and higher after each deluge:
1889, 1936, 1977.

She holds the shape of a perfect moon in her hands,
it hangs on the slides like the open mouths of caves,
the origins of slag and sediment.
I think of them as jewels I could press to my chest,
conjuring designs that would spring
from my steel town’s unnavigable paths
to the Atlantic — its infancy spent stretched
from Mexico to Newfoundland –
its printed legacy falling across my throat.

Photos of students on assignment smile while
digging up the East Sides’ gentrifying core.
Water collected from the undersides
of empty storefront earth,
local park benches where no one sits, is stored
in bins that strain through test tubes and petri dishes
and is catalogued in ways I’ll never understand.

But those fires, cores, artifacts – raw rock and crystals I claim
from the peaks of my Western Pennsylvania hilltops–
what sails above and lies far beneath the Conemaugh Gap.
Could an ancient flood stone rest upon my wrist?
Could my pulse be kept by a fossiled imprint
of the Little Conemaugh’s rocky bottom?